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Reputation Flagging

On March 27, 2007, LorainCounty.com began a new experiment in the Conversation Forums called 'Reputation Flagging'. Under this experiment, users of LorainCounty.com have the ability to flag posts that they feel abuse the Community Standards. When a post has been flagged enough times, it will automatically be removed from the site.

History

When the Forums first began, there was no formal review policy and posts were only reviewed and removed after users emailed or called.

After a few years, users helped create the Community Standards and internally, every message was reviewed for compliance with the Community Standards.

As the Forums continue to grow, it has become a challenge to keep up with the internal review process.

  1. Sheer number of posts - sometimes as many as 500 messages in a single day.
  2. Diversity of Topics - with 52 different Forum Boards, we have no way of understanding all of the issues in all of the communities.
  3. Gray Area - it is easy to review and remove posts that are clearly abusive; but as the number of posts increased, so did the number that were in the gray area.
  4. No Way to Please Everyone - in fact, we often received emails from both sides of a topic asking why we were only removing their posts and not the opposition's posts.

Why Flagging

Simply put, we believe LorainCounty.com users are the best! Who better to decide what is and is not appropriate than the users themselves?

Why Reputation Flagging

Reputation flagging is our experiment to ensure that regular users control the Forums and to avoid undue influence from non-users and abusers. We want to ensure that an open, robust conversation is maintained. We want to ensure that all legitimate points of view are heard and that one side does not 'remove' posts from an opposing viewpoint.

Flagging Summary

Whenever a LorainCounty.com user reads a post that abuses the Community Standards, they have the ability to flag the post as 'mild abuse', 'abuse', or 'flagrant abuse'. When a post receives enough flags, it is automatically removed from the site. An email is automatically sent to the person who wrote the post providing them an option to appeal the removal. If on appeal, it is clearly obvious that the post should not have been removed, it will be put back on the site. The identity of users who place flags will always be held strictly confidential.

Reputation Flagging Summary

All LorainCounty.com users receive a reputation number that is increased by their contributions to the Forums and decreased if they abuse the Forums. Posts from users with a high reputation number must receive more flags to be removed than posts from users with a low reputation number. Additionally, a flag from a user with a high reputation number holds more weight than a flag from a user with a low reputation number.

Feedback

As always, we are very interested in the thoughts and opinions of LorainCounty.com users. If you have ideas for improving the system or questions, please email them to Contact@LorainCounty.com.

For a very detailed explanation of Reputation Flagging, click here.

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